Month: July 2026

The Neon and the Setting Sun – Out in the Street III

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Spanish Avenue (2020).  Acrylic on board. From my book Out in the Street, available at Amazon Books. Artwork and text copyright Danny Grosso.

Latin lovers flash in and out of the doorways in open shirts and Cuban heels. The place reeks of food and bad-girl perfume and when the sun sets everything just gets more pungent. The subtle messages here now resound against the colors of the neon and the setting sun. Love and hate, the staccato stutter of the signage, and the glint of stiletto metal. Someone calls across the gangway in a stifled moan. Not a victim of violence, it is the ache of longing, across the ages. The Italians and Puerto Ricans that live here understand it without regard to language. It is the lament of existence borne of the choices we all make and the ones we don’t. You love who you love. Can’t stop that. Love and hate beckon from opposite sides of the avenue and yet we ride up the middle, in the danger zone, where we’ll likely be run over.

At night the windows open and the moaning continues,  in chorus now – those who chose to deny their love, and those who chose not to. A concert choir’s nightly rendition of dissonant voices, finding harmony, somehow, in the space between love and hate.

-Danny Grosso

Instagram @artispolitics

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Paris

Paris (2021). Acrylic on mounted photographic print. From my book Holograms and Long Tweeds, available at Amazon Books.

Excerpt: The technology introduced itself, unannounced, and soon everyone was floating above the city. In time, the tech was outlawed among civilians, but the authorities kept it and refined it, and there were cops and federal agents flying about like pigeons.

The company that had perfected the anti-gravity implant that had enabled the floaters was rumored to be Chinese, but there was no way for civilians to know that for sure. The corporations that made the stuff that makes the world had gotten so big over the first half of the 21st century that the influence that all garnered bought them a lot of secrecy, and government complicity. They really had to pose a danger to order, not safety, but order, to generate adverse regulation. The floaters peering into the windows of the ivory towers accomplished the fear of disorder, and besides, governments would become the biggest consumers of this technology anyway, so the regulation, or the deal, was implemented.

But for a few weeks in between, the life above the rooftops was wonderful.

From my story Paris, from my book Holograms and Long Tweeds.

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